Top 70 John Podhoretz Quotes

The most passionately anti-Obama Republican politicians and activists consider themselves the truest and purest of conservatives, and often unleash their scorn and fury on others who also call themselves conservative but differ on strategy and tactics.

You want a culture where citizens are free to express themselves and so live in the openness necessary to the functioning of a successful economy? Israel has a free press, much of it openly hostile to the parties in power.

Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a ‘shellacking’ in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.

The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it.

Let us now praise Barack Obama.

What Obama is saying is simple: The United States has become Too Big To Fail.

As the Republican nominee, it was Romney’s job to find a way to speak to some of those groups of voters and offer practical solutions to their difficulties that both resonated with them and sounded plausible to them.

Memories of the last nine years have turned Ground Zero from a site of horror, to a reminder of grief, to an occasion for ludicrous artistic posturing – and now to something very close to parody.

I’ve worked as someone’s deputy, and now it’s time for me to run something. It’s time for me to run my own shop.

Political folk talk a lot these days about ‘messaging’ – a neologism designed to describe the way in which parties and politicians consciously characterize their efforts. It is only intended to be positive – i.e., ‘Our messaging is designed to show we care.’

As a matter of policy, increasing taxes on the most economically productive group, which already generates 60 percent of the nation’s federal revenues, during a sustained period of economic doldrums is a wretched idea.

Aside from being bad sportsmanship – Romney basically said Obama won by cheating – he was displaying the same obtuseness about the wants and needs of ordinary people that did more to torpedo his campaign than any goodies Obama might have had to dole out.

Obama’s presidency hasn’t been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs.

The thing is, Obama is right that it would be a calamity for the government to default on its debt by not meeting its obligations. Such a thing has never happened and can’t be allowed to happen.

Bouncing a sitting president requires conscious action, a national decision to redirect the country’s course. This cuts against the grain, and that’s why incumbents have a natural advantage.

Barack Obama is one of the greatest politicians in American history.

Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He’ll never be president.

When Obama was inaugurated, he and his team had an insight – though whether the insight was conscious or not I don’t know. But it was this: The TARP $700 billion price tag was a new kind of model.

There’s no light at the end of the tunnel in the Republican message, no promise of better things to come. There’s only the present stagnation, followed by a slow decline.

Romney is a good, intelligent, extraordinarily generous man who put on a great fight. But he didn’t understand the country or the people he sought to lead, and that is why he lost.

Obama is talking to voters as though he is their boss, or their principal, or their father. He is not any of those things. He is their employee. And employers don’t like it when their employees yell at them – even if their employees have it right.

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

Christopher Nolan’s astounding third Batman feature, ‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ represents the true maturation of the superhero movie – and provides the key to understanding the bottomless craving moviegoers have for these films, 34 years after the Christopher Reeve Superman gave birth to the genre.

Over the next decade, cities and states across America will be compelled to tighten their belts as the really big bills – the pension bills they cannot afford – come due. They’ll have to go after existing contracts with current workers.

The idea that the rest of the world was somehow being held hostage by the Arab-Israeli conflict once had a minimal basis in reality. In the first 20 years of Israel’s existence, every Arab country was in an active state of war with the Jewish state.

The problem is that borrowing money to pay back more borrowed money that will oblige you in the future to borrow even more money doesn’t sound kosher. Because it isn’t.

For Obama to save himself, he should be thinking about the example of an unlikely Republican predecessor: Richard Nixon.

If you want to know why Republicans and conservatives are in a political crisis, you need only consider the fact that the Right’s deeply held view now boils down to this: Taxes should not go up on the wealthy, and your health benefits should be cut.

What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films – their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil.

The classic rule of thumb is that if you are an intellectual ideological magazine, you do better in opposition than you do if your views are reflected by people in power.

The great mystery is why robots come off so well in science-fiction films when the human characters are often so astoundingly wooden.

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we’re desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

Hurtling the Pentagon into an unprecedented budgetary meltdown is horrifically irresponsible. Obama doesn’t care. This is war – not against the Taliban, but war against the GOP. He has Republicans on the ropes, and that’s a victory he savors and desires – unlike Afghanistan, where he seems only to want to turn tail.

As a member of the Mormon church, Romney is instructed to tithe 10 percent of his income. That’s in keeping with most charitable giving: Religious institutions get about one-third of all contributions, according to ‘The American’ magazine.

By the time Obama came into office, Washington had already agreed over a period of a few weeks to a $700 billion government infusion into the world banking system. Nothing of the sort had ever been done before, and it was done spit spot with very little national debate.

You want a political culture that works to create conditions under which an economy can thrive? Since signing the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians, Israel has spent two decades working to unshackle its economy from its socialist roots, with remarkable results.

Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.

You’d think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.

The exit polls suggest that after a relatively disappointing first term, Obama managed to reassemble almost all of his 2008 electorate.

Many people crave security and stability rather than risk-taking, and that doesn’t make them any less American. They are the workers rather than the job creators, and all societies need both.

While in Israel, Mitt Romney said something every sane person knows to be true: There is great cultural and political meaning in the fact that Israel has prospered while the Palestinians have festered.

Your race and gender don’t change, but you can choose to change your political affiliation at will.

I was wholeheartedly attracted to the conservative atmosphere that permeated the city of Washington.

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party’s voters.

Some candidates need to say provocative things that make noise to break through the media muffle and get themselves noticed.

The 2004 presidential election that saw George W. Bush win with 51 percent of the vote was the last one Republicans will ever win with the overwhelmingly white and male coalition they have now.

Nixon was an awful president in many ways, including in some of his foreign-policy choices. But he left no doubt that foreign policy and America’s leadership in the world outside its borders was of paramount importance to him.

For the record, I am not an admitted homosexual, nor am I a homosexual, though I do know the lyrics to every show tune ever written, which might perhaps account for the confusion.